Going into close reading a blog I thought I was going to be looking at some flashy bright page filled with emotional posts about high school sounding drama. I expected to get lots of laughs out reading it and would feel like I knew a lot about the persons intimate details of their life. For this assignment, I used someone's blog about a trip to Europe that they had been on this summer, and found it to be very interesting to examine.
The first thing I noticed was that the blog was covered in pictures. This made sense to me because since they were overseas, they would want to show everyone all of the different things that they had seen. However, as I looked closer, I noticed that the pictures were more of the people than scenery and places. The pictures of the people ranged from them being all dressed up and fancy to them making the funniest face they could manage. This told me that this was someone who clearly wanted to show off the multiple sides of their personality to everyone on the web, and the experience of the trip was greatly dependent on the relationships and quality of time with friends.
There was lots of personality in the writing that was there too. There was a lot of all capitalized words and smily faces when things were going well, and lots of "sighs" and frowny faces when things were difficult. This is something I think is seen a lot in the online world today. People try to communicate how they would be reacting and even appearing in person when no one else can see them. We use side comments, sound effects, and faces to try to get people to understand our hearts and deep emotions. This blog definitely showed that desire for people to know exactly how this person was feeling every time they wrote, and tried to get the readers to understand what she would be acting and looking like if they could be hearing all of this information in person. As humans, I think this is a deep desire we have; to be understood, and this can be seen through the side writing of this blog.
Something I found very surprising about this blog was the fact that the background was very plain. With so many pictures and so much personality, I would have expected the background to have some sort of animation or bright colors. Instead, the creator used a basic font with a brown colored plain background. The reason I think she may have in leaving her background plain was that she didn't want it to take away from the personal information she was sharing with the viewer. This makes a lot of sense because I think people that create blogs want the viewers to concentrate on the creator and their life rather than an exciting background that the computer created that doesn't have anything to do with their personal lives. This person clearly wants people who look at this blog to be pulled into her life and everything that she experienced on this trip and not be distracted by the rest of the screen or outside world.
There were some things I was surprised about when looking at this blog, and somethings that I had expected. The background was a surprised, I was by how plain seeming it was, but in the end it made perfect sense. There wasn't any immature drama in this blog, but it did want the reader to become fully engaged in what their personal life was like during this experience.
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